Sony restores access to PSN after DDoS attack - three days later

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Back in the game

Sony has revealed that it is has managed to get the PlayStation Network back online after suffering a massive three-day outage due to a DDoS attack.

Christmas was cancelled for the world's gaming community this year, when both Sony's PSN and Microsoft's Xbox Live were forced offline by a hacker group. Responsibility for the attack on the online services was claimed by Lizard Squad on Twitter - the same group that instigated an attack earlier in December and in August.

Sony has updated a blog post to explain that the PSN should now work for for its 50-odd million users blaming the outage on 'artificially high levels of traffic'.

"PlayStation Network is back online. As you probably know, PlayStation Network and some other gaming services were attacked over the holidays with artificially high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay," reads the post.

"This may have prevented your access to the network and its services over the last few days. Thanks again for your support and patience. We'll provide any further updates here."

Joining the Dots

What the blog post doesn't include is that Kim Dotcom may well have played a big part in bringing back the PSN and Xbox Live.

Dotcom, again through Twitter, offered up vouchers for his Mega service in exchange for stopping the attack, which seemed to be accepted.

Although Xbox Live was also subject to downtime, Microsoft fixed its problems relatively quickly.

Sony, though, with its on-going battles with North Korea over The Interview, its mass email leak and the spectre of 2011's PSN attack looming over it, will hope 2015 is hack free.